You can argue about how the new era started: with the atomic bomb, the steam engine or perhaps early agriculture. But on the scale of deep geological time, 4.5 billion years, such times are all “now.” ‘Now’ is the Anthropocene – the name is also disputed – in which man not only undergoes his environment, but changes it at an increasing rate.
In deep time you usually look back, at the changes on the planet that you now find as layers of rock. Volcanic eruptions and solidifying magma, colliding tectonic plates. The chalk on an ocean floor that became the White Cliffs of Dover. New life and extinction that fossils tell about. You may also wonder what our era will look like in the future in the ‘geological record’. Suppose there is still – or again – someone to see it.
Stephen Cornford, a British artist, takes a shot at it. He took apart an iPhone and heated the parts in a lab oven that he heated to volcanic heat, 1,500 degrees Celsius. He took photographs of the remains under a microscope, which he calls ‘petrographs’, which somewhat resemble the hand-made, marbled paper of old book covers.
Whether petrified ‘technofossils’ will ever really look like this is speculation. Cornford used only a short period of high temperature, not eons of lower heat and extreme pressure that can occur in the Earth’s crust. But it seems logical that our electronic waste will leave traces. The world produces about 50 million tons annually, of which less than a third is recycled.
And you can think of zillions of selfies floating weightlessly through the Cloud, but that requires hardware – batteries, processors, displays, cables, memory banks – made from minerals. From aluminum, silicon and carbon to adolinium, hafnium and lanthanum from the bottom exotic row of the periodic table. Eventually they will all emerge in strata.
Early photographers searched for the right chemicals to capture the light. And the photos from the digital age finally surrender their minerals. Still cycle. Dust art thou.
Stephen Cornford: Petrified MediaEriskay, 108 pages, €24.00